Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
Denis Topalović, in his blog post for Indiana University Press Journals on W. G. Sebald, notes that "When he was once asked what compelled him to write The Rings of Saturn, Sebald didn’t look back to the past; instead, he turned to his own present, and in particular to the Yugoslav Wars (1991-99) that had broken out just as he was beginning to work on his book."
Read the full post HERE.
His Journal of Modern Literature essay on Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is available FREE, linked in the post
Journal of Modern Literature 48.4 (Summer 2025) on the theme "History and Geography" is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55722.
Content includes:
James Dutton
A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities’ Unfinishable History
Laura L. Behling
“[T]his trivial and vulgar occasion”: P.R. Stephensen’s Lampoons of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
Andrés Ibarra Cordero
Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library
Hannah Loeb
“Like leaves against the sunlight”: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight”
Cilliers van den Berg
Patterns of Meaning and the Claims of History: S.J. Naudé’s The Third Reel
Denis Topalović
The Rings of Sarajevo: W.G. Sebald and the Bosnian War
FREE!
Aaron Shaheen
The Restitution of Harold Krebs: A Cartographic Reading of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”
Duncan Hay
Downriver’s Flâneur(s): Space and Representation in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair
Ryan Johnson
Confused Categories: Russia and the East-West Divide in William Plomer’s Sado
Jack Dudley
Methodological Pluralism and the Cause of Progress: A Review Essay of Jesse Wolfe’s Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury
Laura de la Parra Fernández
Postwar Interiorities: Review of The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel
Hong Zeng and Ping Zhang
The Impact of Taoist and Zen Literature and Arts on Western Modernism: A Dialogue with Zhaoming Qian
Edited by Urmila Seshagiri
Princeton UP, 2025
ISBN: 9780691263137
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263137/the-life-of-violet
In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.
A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.
This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.
“A fresh perspective on Woolf’s early ‘literary experiments’ . . . . Suffused with delicate magic and penetrating wit, the stories in The Life of Violet foreground a radical world structured by laughter, magic, women’s friendships, and egalitarian social relations.” —Foreword Reviews
“Fascinating and indispensable.” —Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project
“What an extraordinary volume! Here we meet newly discovered, revised versions of Virginia Woolf’s early stories based on the life of Violet Dickinson. These tales are laugh-out-loud funny. They are also profound early experiments in the fiction/biography blend that later gave rise to Orlando and the feminist musing about women’s education, marriage, and literary history that infuse A Room of One’s Own. An illuminating preface and afterword by Urmila Seshagiri bring Dickinson’s biography and intellectual contributions into view and deftly analyze the stories and their place within Woolf’s oeuvre. Must reading for lovers of Woolf’s fiction.”—Jessica Berman, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf
Urmila Seshagiri is distinguished professor of humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Randi Saloman, editor
Broadview Press, 2025
ISBN: 9781554814473
https://broadviewpress.com/product/a-room-with-a-view/#tab-description
This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them—but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his narrative.
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.
“Readers being introduced (or re-introduced) to E.M. Forster’s Room with a View are treated by Randi Saloman to a beautiful volume, with a deeply informative and accessible introduction that guides us through Forster’s career; illuminating footnotes throughout the novel; and a feast of delights in the appendices. Literary and biographical-minded readers will learn from Forster’s letters, journals, and essays, whereas the visual-minded can linger on images from a contemporary travel guide; stills from the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel; and photographs of Forster, both as a sensitive young novelist and as an éminence grise of English letters.” — Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Stanislaus
“This edition of A Room with a View is the most sensitive, comprehensive, and suggestive that I can imagine. It provides the student with a clear sense of the text’s history and social context, elucidates complex knots of culture lucidly, and vivifies the central issue of sexual knowledge and consent in Forster’s time and ours. The appended materials are excellent in both selection and scope, providing many new avenues into the text and its adaptations.” — Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University
“A wonderful and elegant annotated edition that provides incisive analysis and support to the reader without crowding the core text. Saloman’s judicious use of notes is supremely effective and greatly enhances the experience of reading this classic novel. Broadview’s edition will appeal not only to students, but to curious readers of all stripes.” — Bob Davidson, University of Toronto
Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.
By Matthew Scully
Fordham UP, 2024
ISBN: 9781531507077
https://fordhampress.com/democratic-anarchy-hb-9781531507060.html
Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?
BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.
Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.
By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.
Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation. —Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons
All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence. —Anglia: Journal of English Philology
Matthew Scully is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.
